"Hamlet," Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency: Not to Be (review)

Hamlet has sometimes been critically interpreted as a modern man struggling against the strictures of the past, a character who represents the rise of Protestant (or secular) individualism from the ashes of Catholicism, a prince whose story demonstrates the potential—and potential pitfalls—facing the human intellect once released from the restraints of medieval superstition. That narrative, implicitly supported by the teleological assumptions of Whig historiography, is turned on its head by John E. Curran Jr.'s study. In this book, it is Catholicism, not Protestantism, that represents "human and cosmic potentialities" (202). Hamlet is said to be "a Catholic . . . caught in a strictly Protestant world" (5) who wants to live by the "hopeful, Catholic idea of being" (19) but must, in Act 5, accept his imprisonment within the limiting strictures of "predestinarian Protestantism" (5). The play is ultimately a lament for "what has been lost with the fall of Catholicism" (202).

This argument could be seen as a contribution to recent scholarship that has demonstrated Catholicism's continued vitality in the life and imagination of early modern Protestant England. But the best work in that field is characterized by the subtlety with which it explores interrelations between Catholic and Protestant ways of thinking, believing, and behaving. Such scholarship has posited a more fluid definition of devotional identity than that permitted by either Protestant historiography or Catholic hagiography, while acknowledging the complexities of these often internally divided, geographically variable, and rapidly evolving systems of beliefs. Although Curran's book dovetails in some ways with such scholarly efforts, it seems oddly untouched by recent developments in the field, for "Hamlet," Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency constructs simplifying generalizations about Protestantism and Catholicism that cannot fully account for Hamlet's rich complexities.

Following a foreword by James Nohrnberg, the book's first chapter establishes the concept of "contingency" indicated in the title. "To me," Curran writes, "this one concept marks the essential difference between the world views of the two religious persuasions: on any given point, Catholicism posits the real existence of contingency and Calvinist Protestantism denies it" (6). Catholicism is "antideterministic and consequently optimistic about a person's ability to change his or her lot and have a causal role in salvation" (6); Protestantism represents an "unmitigated determinism" (16) that renders human action and time itself meaningless. Curran acknowledges that he is, in a sense, adopting the stereotypes of anti-Calvinist polemicists, but he argues that "however Calvinism might try to qualify itself, it is a short and easy logical leap to deduce from it an especially rigid and rigorous outlook, one ultimately both bleak and uncompromising" (7). Just as the book fails to fully account for nuances of doctrinal belief between English and continental forms of Protestantism (especially the subtleties of Eucharistic controversy), its characterization of Catholicism may be unfamiliar to those acquainted with the Catholic devotional, poetic, political, and hagiographic literature of the period. As with Calvinism, the book's emphasis on Catholic contingency leads it at moments to accept characterizations provided by polemical opponents: Curran all but endorses standard antipapist claims that Catholics were free to sin with impunity when he writes that "vows of celibacy . . . if violated by commerce with whores, could easily be redeemed" (156), given that "matters were negotiable" in the Catholic Church for any violation of chastity short of clerical marriage (156) and that "practices like priestly concubinage . . . were more or less tolerated if not encouraged" (169).

These characterizations of Protestantism and Catholicism provide the framework for the book's analysis of suicide, time, purgatory, theater, and the frailty of women in Hamlet. Chapter 2 argues that "the Be" and the "Not to Be" in Hamlet's most famous soliloquy represent Protestantism and Catholicism, respectively: "[T]his Be . . . to which Hamlet seems so adverse but to which he in effect finally capitulates, captures with extreme vividness the predetermined and absolutely necessary mode of being described...